Speaking at the TCA press tour (via IGN), executive producer Brad Simpson noted that where Season 2 would have more of a disaster movie feel than the pop culture vibe permeating The People v. O.J. Simpson, it doesn’t mean any future seasons would be eager to return to high-profile court cases, or even the same decade:

We don’t want to repeat ourselves, and that’s part of the thing. We don’t want to go back to the ‘90s again, we don’t want to go back to the well. We did the Crime of the Century. We like to define ‘crime’ broadly, and I love true crime, but I don’t just love one kind. We’ll probably at one point pick maybe something that’s more along the lines of a less famous case that has juicy stuff. We’d like to tell a story of injustice. We wish we had Making a Murderer or Serial as one of our seasons, but those have been done. We’re looking at that, and we’re exploring lots of topics throughout history.

Even poor Emmy-nominated Sarah Paulson had her hopes for a Marcia Clark return shot down, as Simpson quickly refuted her interest in doing an epilogue season to The People v. O.J. Simpson:

We’ve been pitched that. We don’t want to overstay our welcome. I think this is closed off. You don’t have the same complexity of characters. That show would just be about O.J., I think. … I don’t think you can get that. I think the case is closed for us on O.J.

For the moment at least, few details on a second season have been made public, other than to note the as-yet-untitled Katrina story will have different writers than Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. No returning cast have been confirmed, though American Crime Story Season 2 is still eyed for 2017.

Will the series be able to recapture its same intensity after such a dramatic shift?